Worldwinner.com has taken loads of your favorite casual games, including Plants vs. Zombies, Bejeweled and more, and turned them into a competitive version where you can join tournaments and win rewards that can be turned into real world prizes like cash or gift certificates. I guess at that point they aren’t really casual games any longer now are they?

In the tournaments you play for real cash that you’ve turned into game credit on the site. It’s slightly cumbersome as there are reward points and then there are game credits. Obviously, they couldn’t figure out a single virtual currency for everything. Rewards points are low value and 3,500 of them turn into $5 in game credits and there are bulk discounts as you go up which will require you to make a payment somehow. You can also turn those reward points into gift certificates for places like Amazon.com or get them as gift cards from American Express or Sephora.

Really, there are few things to do with them and getting some of those prizes would take an awful lot of gaming as the $200 gift card is 140,000 reward points. An average reward ranges from 300 to 400 points unless you want to upgrade your account (which requires payment) which will give you 2,000 points and playing ten games which nets you 800.

Upgrading your account will cost you from $10 to $30 which you are depositing into your account there to be used as entry fees in tournaments. The first deposit will be doubled and they’ll give you 500-2000 points for doing it. What does upgrading get you?

You get to enter pay-to-play tournaments, the whole point of the site. You’ll get more reward points as every time you participate in a cash game you’ll get some, win, lose or draw. You could qualify for the Premier club which gets you Rewards Store discounts, message boards, and the chance to test and contribute to WorldWinner’s newest games before they launch. Yes, underwhelming to say the least.

Upgrading also gets you daily freeplay entries and the ability to send virtual gifts which really just sounds like a waste of money to me if the whole point of the place is to get paid to play, why waste it on imaginary gifts?

There are also some free daily games to be played. When I clicked on the first one, it told me that it wasn’t Firefox ready and that I needed to come back and login with Internet Explorer to play it. This from a company that makes you install a plug-in to play.